I write about science, technology and how they affect the planet's hairless primates. In particular, how they affect the philosophies of said primates. I've written for The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, The Boston Globe, Cosmos Magazine among others. My book, The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Basic Books) is available in paperback and eBook formats. I'm also a video producer for educational apps, which is why I also tend to write about media. Tips and suggestions are welcome, to: johnwfarrell@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Meeting The Challenge Of Science For Muslims On Campus

The author with Nidhal Guessoum and Ali Hassan on the Science and Islam Panel at University of Iowa

In the U.S., debates about science and religion in the classroom tend to focus on American public high schools, where local school boards argue about Darwin and the Bible.

But as the recent controversy at University College in London showed earlier this academic year, there are considerable tensions and debates among Muslims about the degree to which science challenges fundamental tenets of Islam.

Project Nur, a student-inspired initiative of the American Islamic Congress, is a program intended to engage Muslim students and others on college campuses on these and other topics.

The project is managed by Shakir Mohammed from the AIC’s office in Washington, D.C. Mohammed grew up in Ethiopia and came to the U.S. on a scholarship to study business management. He stayed on after earning a Master’s in International Development and Environmental Sustainability, and worked for the City of Pittsburgh’s Business Department for three years before joining the AIC.

To address the growing concern about Islam and creationism (among other issues), Shakir launched the first of six seminars on Islam and Science at the University of Iowa last month. The seminar series is also funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which takes a proactive approach (some would say too proactive) in the debates about religion and science.

As a former Templeton-Cambridge Journalism fellow, with particular interest in science and religion, I was invited to be on the first panel. (I’ll be posting a video with highlights from the panel in a follow up post.) I’m also interested in the history of Islamic science, particularly its huge influence on European philosophy and science in the Middle Ages.

The Keynote speaker for this first event is an astronomer and author I’ve written about before, and one well placed to discuss the intersection of hard science and Islam: Nidhal Guessoum, a professor of astrophysics at American University of Sharjah, and author of Islam’s Quantum Question (which I reviewed here).

Guessoum’s presentation was a call for Muslims to avoid trying to read modern science back into the Qur’an. I’jaz, which is a current of thought quite popular now in Turkey and other Islamic countries, tries to interpret specific passages of the Qur’an as predictions of specific scientific theories. Devotees claim, for example, that the Qur’an predicted Darwinian evolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Big Bang.

Guessoum sees this as highly counterproductive to science education in the Middle East.

After the panel, I asked him about his hopes and expectations for engaging the debate at this level, in presentations and panels on campuses in the U.S.

“For me, the Cosmology and Islam panel was meant to achieve two important goals,” he said. “The first: to show people, especially Muslims, in what way relating Cosmology with Islam can be attempted (i.e. certainly not at the literal Quranic-verses level), more specifically at the conceptual level.

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Unfortunately…there will ALWAYS be a chasm between THEORY…. and Faith… Particularly when TRUTH is assigned to a priori assumptions on both sides. I subscribe to the notion that science and religion are NOT incompatible… but in fact are only using a different vocabulary to describe the same events.

As far as cosmology and religion… please read the excerpt from Wikipedia below of little known “FACTS” about the Big Bang theory AND the expanding Universe Hypothesis:

“Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He was the first person to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was also the first to derive what is now known as the Hubble’s law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his ‘hypothesis of the primeval atom’.”

The approach these countries are taking are not stating the Quran “predicted” these science theories because these ideas are based on reality that has existed since the dawn of time. They explore the Quran’s statements on these matters to emphasis that Islam doesn’t challenge science. This is why I find Guessoum rejection, and why he thinks that combining Quranic verses with science is not able to reach a conceptual level, bewildering.

Interpreting through verses doesn’t mean one has to limit him or herself to those phrases in understanding science. Moreover, Quranic teachings emphasize advancing society and interacting with others. Thus, utilizing Quranic verses encourages Muslim to further conceptualize science phenomenons through application and conversation. For example, by studying science at the University of London. The students who walked out and are complaining are scapegoating their faith so they don’t have to learn, or they are so ignorant that they’ve accepted society’s idea of religion as noncoexistable with science that they decided to apply this belief their own faith. Either way, they are a disappointment.